HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for five games, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the tables below
highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for
evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other
architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.
HEXUS.bang4buck at 1,920x1,200
* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course. This will be updated with a new revision which covers non-3D performance in the very near future.
EvaluationThe HEXUS.bang4buck numbers are in line with other high-end cards'. The inherent problem facing companies designing pre-overclocked Radeon HD 5870s is quite simple: the overclocking headroom isn't fantastic and the cost of engineering a new cooler means that the etail price increases by over 10 per cent when compared to a reference card. Put the two together and the HEXUS.bang4buck isn't quite as good as the reference card's.
Overclocking
We had fun and games with the card when overclocking. The memory scaled to an effective 5,200MHz, which was expected. The core, too, scaled quite well, running up to 950MHz with decent stability.
Putting the two together gave us a 7.2 per cent increase in our benchmarks run at 2,560x1,600 - not bad for free.
